Skeddly Blog

Yesterday, Amazon announced the ability to start and stop RDS instances. This is a welcome feature since it now allows you to easily save money for development environments by stopping your RDS instances when they are not needed, like overnight and on weekends.

This new feature only works for RDS instances that are not Multi-AZ and are not part of a replication group.

Amazon Athena is a query service that allows you to query data directly from Amazon S3. We have talked about Amazon Athena before. Athena is part of Amazon’s “serverless” services. Simply dump data into S3, define a table schema, and start querying. You don’t need to allocate servers to host your data.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new action: Run Athena Query. It’s the first utilizing the Amazon Athena services.

Using IAM roles with your EC2 instances has been the recommended best practice for managing AWS credentials deployed to your instances. Previously, an EC2 instance needed to have an IAM role assigned to it at launch time. Only recently has AWS allowed IAM roles to be associated with EC2 instances after the EC2 instance has been launched.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new action in our ever-growing list of action types: Attach IAM Role to EC2 Instances.

From its beginning, Skeddly has been logging all action activity in your Skeddly account. You can view any of these logs at any time within Skeddly, and you can download them individually, or in a monthly package. For many organizations, these logs are invaluable in their auditing strategies, much like CloudTrail is.

Starting today, we’re making it even easier for you to retain your own copy of your action logs. You can now archive your action logs to an Amazon S3 bucket in your AWS account.

As we have previously discussed, Amazon Lightsail provides a simpler pricing model compared to Amazon EC2. However, you can still benefit from some cost-saving strategies with your Lightsail instances.

Like RDS and Redshift, you can schedule your Lightsail instances to be created each morning, and deleted each evening. This way, you won’t be charged for your instances overnight or over the weekend.